The U.S. Supreme Court denied last-minute appeals from one of two Arkansas killers scheduled for execution on Monday evening, clearing the way for the first of two back-to-back executions to proceed. Jack Jones, 52, who raped and killed a woman in 1995 and left her 11-year-old daughter for dead, and Marcel Williams, 46, who kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman in 1997, were scheduled for lethal injection in what would be the first time in 17 years that a U.S. state executed two inmates on the same day. The two men separately filed 11th-hour applications with the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday afternoon seeking to have their executions halted.



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